Occidental Petroleum is doubling down on enhanced oil recovery and may source carbon dioxide from industrial plants as part of its efforts to minimize its carbon footprint and eventually become carbon neutral, President and CEO Vicki Hollub said in an interview. EOR, which involves injecting carbon dioxide into oilfields to boost oil recovery, is typically used in conventional reservoirs, but Occidental is experimenting with the technique in shale fields.

US District Judge Rudolph Contreras in Washington, D.C., halted oil and natural gas drilling on nearly 500 square miles in Wyoming, citing climate change concerns. Contreras ruled that the federal government must conduct a new environmental review that properly considers the impact of energy development on climate change before issuing new drilling permits.

Construction setbacks have forced Kinder Morgan to delay the startup of the first liquefaction train at its Elba Island LNG export facility near Savannah, Ga., until April, while the remaining nine units are expected to come into service by early next year. Train 1 was originally scheduled to be placed into service by the end of last year, but startup was pushed to March and now April.

West Texas Intermediate crude for April delivery climbed 1.4% to settle at a four-month high of $59.83 per barrel on Wednesday after the Energy Information Administration reported a 9.6 million-barrel plunge in US crude oil supplies. The EIA said gasoline and distillate stockpiles also slid by 4.6 million barrels and 4.1 million barrels, respectively.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management's latest Gulf of Mexico oil and natural gas lease sale attracted $244.3 million worth of high bids on 1.26 million of the 78.5 million acres made available. "We saw a modest increase in overall spend, but it was outpaced by the increase in acreage leading to lower amount per acre, furthering our hypothesis that it is a buyer's market in the Gulf of Mexico," Wood Mackenzie senior research analyst William Turner said.

Germany-based Wintershall plans to increase oil exploration off the Brazilian coast this year, CEO Mario Mehren said today. The BASF subsidiary, which received regional exploration licenses in 2018, expects initial seismic study results from three Potiguar Basin blocks by the middle of next year, Mehren said.

Norwegian oil company Equinor is reportedly mulling a full or partial sale of its Eagle Ford Shale business as it shifts its focus to other parts of the US, particularly the natural gas-rich Appalachian Basin. Equinor held rights to 28,733 net hectares in the Eagle Ford at the end of last year.

As the independents that spearheaded the shale revolution slow down Permian Basin activity and face investor pressure, oil majors are flexing their muscles and asserting their dominance in the region, potentially making it harder for smaller drillers to compete. ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron and Royal Dutch Shell operate roughly 1.8 million hectares in the Permian and have 75 rigs there, an increase of 44 from 2017, data from Drillinginfo show.

Scientists are trying to figure out how a massive amount of light, sandy quartzite, often found in river deltas and beaches, ended up on the Comoros' Anjouan Island, which is made up of dark volcanic rock. Cornelia Class, a geochemist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, is trying to determine the age of the quartzite, which somehow moved onto the island from the surrounding ocean floor.